Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, and A Spark of Heavenly Fire. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”

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The Lost Secret (499 Word Contest Entry)

November 15, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Yesterday I wrote Requiem For a Writing Contest to honor the passing of a 499-word Dan Brown tribute contest that used to be sponsored by a writing group I belonged to. Today I’d like to post a previous entry to the contest. Although the entry was supposed to be a spoof of The Lost Symbol, it now seems as if it would be an interesting story in its own right. I’d have to rewrite it, of course, to lose the similarities between the beginning of this story and the beginning of DB’s, but it might be fun. Someday.

THE LOST SECRET

The secret is how to live.

Since the beginning of time, the secret had always been how to die, or rather, how to make others die — and he’d learned that secret well. Now he needed to learn an even greater secret — how to live . . . forever.

The thirty-four-thousand-year-old Voltari gazed down at the crucible cradled in his palms. It was filled with blood, the blood of all the innocents who had died that he might live.

Drink it, he told himself. You have nothing to fear. Yet he knew the truth — he had everything to fear. Without death, there is no reason to live. Without death, time yawned immeasurably. Without death . . .

Oh, hell, just drink it.

As was tradition, he’d adorned himself in the latest ritualistic garb — well-tailored white shirt that covered his pale chest and expensive dark suit that made his thin shoulders seem broad. Around his neck hung a noose — a “power-tie” as the brethren called it.

The assembly of brothers encircling him all were adorned in the same funereal regalia. Only the color of their ties varied, from a new-bruise maroon to bright artery-gushing scarlet. Many of these men had powerful stations in life, the rest had powerful stations in death, yet the Voltari knew their ranks meant nothing within these walls. Here all were equals sharing an unearthly bond.

As he surveyed the daunting assembly, the Voltari wondered who in the outside world would ever believe this collection of beings would assemble in one place, much less this place. The room looked like a vault from a great and private banking institution in Switzerland.

The truth, however, was stranger still.

I really am in a Swiss bank vault, with gold stacked everywhere.

The Voltari’s forebears had come to Earth four hundred thousand years ago in search of the gold they needed to granulate like fine sugar and suspend above their world to keep the atmosphere from escaping into space. When the transplanted Voltari workers rebelled at the arduous and unending task of mining, refining, and storing the gold, their leaders had created a race of slave workers, which they facetiously named homo sapiens sapiens, to do the work for them.

And the humans, all unwittingly, had done their job. Most of Earth’s gold now resided in this vault and dozens like it all around the city. In days, weeks at the most, his fellow Voltaris would be arriving for the gold, and he had to make a decision. Now.

He could choose to stay on Earth and rule his financial kingdom forever, or he could choose to return to Votari and be . . . no one.

There was a third choice — not to choose, in which case he would join the ranks of the dead in the netherworld.

Books by Pat Bertram

Available online wherever books and ebooks are sold.

Grief: The Great Yearning is not a how-to but a how-done, a compilation of letters, blog posts, and journal entries Pat Bertram wrote while struggling to survive her first year of grief. This is an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.

When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents -- grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born -- she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead.

In quarantined Colorado, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying from an unstoppable, bio-engineered disease, investigative reporter Greg Pullman risks everything to discover the truth: Who unleashed the deadly organism? And why?

Bob Stark returns to Denver after 18 years in SE Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. At her new funeral, he sees . . . himself. Is his other self a hoaxer, or is something more sinister going on?

Thirty-seven years after being abandoned on the doorstep of a remote cabin in Colorado, Becka Johnson returns to try to discover her identity, but she only finds more questions. Who has been looking for her all those years? And why are those same people interested in fellow newcomer Philip Hansen?